And You And I
by oneiromancer242
Summary: Families draw together when something terrible happens. Short, one-shot Maximoff family character piece.


**I don't own anything. I own a Yes album. But nothing else.**

Lorna likes to come back to this strange game of Happy Families when she can. Especially when her older sister makes it back too, it's easy to fall back into the normality of it all. Over by the sink, Wanda is washing salad, whilst Lorna lays the table for four. Magda is fetching glasses and a pitcher of lemonade out of the cooler. Safely back in her family, it was easy not to think about the outside world, and yet there was still that nagging thought of why she had come. The desperate pull of a family drawing together to count losses they would not mention out loud. Elsewhere there would be the same determination to carry on life as normal, a silent shout of resistance, a show of strength, but ultimately a need to distract themselves.

When she'd heard about the massacre, she had left for home right away. With 63 of her kind lying dead only a state away, inescapable in the headlines and broadcasts, she needed to be around the three she could never bear to lose. The bomb had been carefully placed in what they thought was a well-disguised safe place. As it turned out, it hadn't been safe at all. Nobody had walked away alive. The act had spread ripples of shock, awe, and outrage around the world. It had been to seek shelter from that feeling that Lorna and Wanda had come together to make dinner and pretend the world did not hate them. To hug their mother and sit in their old chairs. Nobody spoke about what had happened out there. Three sat down to dinner and pretended they were normal, smiled and talked and went to bed, and didn't react to the reason they had gathered.

That reaction had not come until three the next morning, when Lorna had shot up out of bed at the sound of a resounding crash, emerging onto the landing to find Wanda already halfway down the stairs to the basement.

It had been perhaps two months since Lorna had last seen her older brother, and in that time she'd almost forgotten that strange dizziness that looking at him in motion could bring on. Ahead of her, Wanda cursed and ducked a thrown pizza box that whizzed past her onto the stairs, at last bringing their brother to a mildly swaying halt in front of her at the sound of her voice. Coming a little closer, Lorna made a wry face as she smelled vodka on the air.

"Where the hell have you been?" Wanda snapped, stalking in and throwing herself down on the battered leather couch, watching her twin try to zip onto the arcade stool, upending it and falling on his ass. Shaking his head as if startled to find himself there. "Does Mom know you're drinking?"

"Do I care?" he responded sullenly, picking himself up and coming to join her and now Lorna on the sofa. Kicking his feet onto the table and upending a glass which he didn't bother to try to catch. Wanda sighed.

"What's the matter with you?"

"What's the matter with _me_ " he rolled his eyes, "What's the matter with _you_?"

"Huh?"

"Coming home, sittin' around like everything's fine, how can you do that?" he scoffed at her. Lorna heard the slight slur in his voice and winced

What's the alternative, Lorna thought. Sitting quietly as she always had done whilst the twins bickered. When they had all lived at home they had snarked at one another over who took whose conditioner, whose turn it was to do the laundry, who had pulled what dumb prank. When Wanda and then Lorna had moved out, they would bicker about when Peter was going to get a haircut, when Wanda was going to admit to their Mom that she wasn't a virgin. Now, they mostly just sparred over when Peter was going to get his act together and quit locking himself in the basement.

Suddenly Lorna felt a little guilty that she had never found the right time to mention the occasional sneaky drinking. Wanda was so busy at college, their youngest made it home far more often, and thus she'd been the one around when Peter started adding liquor stores to the places he would steal from for kicks. She would have wondered why it bothered his twin sister, after all it was just one more illegal activity to add to his list, but she knew only too well that there was absolutely nothing worse than Peter with a little booze in him. Nothing clumsier or less tactful or more sarcastic or less elegant than a drunk speedster.

"You guys came home because of the attack, didn't you?" he muttered, regarding them from under furrowed silver brows, "Didn't you?"

Wanda only nodded, picked at one black-painted fingernail in silence

"And you think that'll solve anything, huh? You think coming back and eating Mom's cooking and sleeping in your own beds is going to fix what's going on out there?"

He gestured with one arm, setting a lava lamp wobbling dangerously. This time though he caught it, reflexes starting to speed up again. It was hard to keep him intoxicated for long, thankfully.

"We just – "

"You just wanna hide. I know"

"Don't put words in my mouth Peter!"

"You're. Hiding." He enunciated with painful slowness, fixing her with a look, "Don't you think it's about time we quit doing that and tried to make a difference? They're *killing* our kind out there, just for being what we are! Doesn't that make you angry?"

"No." Wanda said quietly, levelling up to her twin's piercing gaze without fear and without malice, "It makes me sad"

"Sad." He scoffed at her. Then he was over by the stereo, now laying in an armchair fiddling with a Rubix cube, "It should make you both goddamned furious"

Lorna slips her hand into Wanda's, offers her older sibling a small watery smile. She wonders if Wanda sees how their brother was becoming harder and colder with every day. Even the lines of his face quietly changing from the exuberant cheekiness he'd had in his teenage years to a malevolent discontent that was chilling to see on someone who had always been so lively. They rise from the sofa and leave, the music following them up the stairs

 _Sad preacher nailed upon the colored door of time  
Insane teacher be there reminded of the rhyme_

He had closed his eyes, maybe even passed out at last. Peter tended to forget to eat if he'd got loaded, and eventually he'd crash out from having worn himself to exhaustion. Tomorrow he'd wake up ravenous and cantankerous, tonight maybe he'd get a little peace.

 _There'll be no mutant enemy we shall certify  
Political ends, as sad remains, will die_

Swirling, complex music accompanied the strange words. Wanda and Lorna walked back up the stairs and returned to one room to lay together silently until dawn, pretending to sleep.

Settling back down herself as she heard her children return to bed, Magda lay on her side and wondered if her family was safe. If her babies, who had never asked to be born the way they were and never wished for their differences, would be persecuted and slaughtered like all those poor people in California. Killed for being in their natural state. Magda wondered if one day one of her children would die because of what they were.

Whilst she herself had no parahuman abilities, Magda was still a single mother of three and as such had acute and exceptional perception where it came to her brood. She wondered if that anger she'd heard in Peter's voice was justified, if her little boy was right to feel such hatred for the people who were doing this to his kind. He felt things like this so deeply – even before the world had known about them, he'd been excluded from everything by his abilities. The only thing he'd loved at school was track, and then they'd kicked him off the track team because it was unfair on the others. Even before his abilities had fully manifested he'd been almost unnaturally fast on his feet. Soon after that, the trouble started at school, and before long he'd been politely requested to drop out before he was kicked out. He didn't have friends in the neighbourhood – nobody could keep up with him, he exhausted people with his continual fidgeting and activity. Soon after all that, he'd just stopped bothering to go out except to steal, no longer even bothering to try to blend in amongst ordinary people, preferring just to stay in and play games to the killscreen. Now it seemed the outside world was becoming more threatening to him by the day. It was no wonder he was growing to resent a world that very much didn't want him in their club.

It was easier for the girls, they didn't have to struggle with the frustration of living in a slow-motion world, they could tolerate and even be friends with others. They could pass for normal. Peter didn't have that luxury. Whilst he was by far the most work of any of the kids, Magda had always felt enormous empathy for her wayward son. He had a good heart, and though she could never understand how it felt to him, she could understand why sometimes in the middle of a rambling rant he would look at her with wounded eyes and she'd understand that he would do anything to be like other people at times. To be liked *by* them, even. To not have to continually occupy his mind and body so that he didn't vibrate with the need to use all that pent-up energy, to just be an ordinary 20-year-old kid for a change. But he could no more change that than he could control the weather.

Magda thought, as she lay quietly listening to the steady thrum of bass from the stereo downstairs, that she agreed with her boy. That even people like her, who had little to fear from her fellow humans, should be furious at the idea that her good-looking and athletic little wise-ass would live like this in his mother's basement for fear of being excluded yet again from that big world outside. That her wonderful, kind-hearted, clever girls were scared to get too close to others, even if they could mix with them more easily, for fear of being held to public pillory if their secrets were to be discovered.

There was something terribly wrong with a world where her beautiful children couldn't be who they were in peace.

She didn't sleep any more that night.

 **A/N : Title and lyrics taken from "And You And I", from the album "Close To the Edge" by Yes.**


End file.
